Those concerned with the criminal side of technology will learn from Schick’s well-mounted argument.
If you think election interference and internet fakery are bad now, give it a couple of years.
Artificial intelligence, writes journalist and activist Schick, is growing in sophistication to the point that it is attaining the ability to generate images depicting things that never happened. In the pornography industry, this is already manifest in “nonconsensual porn” or “faceswapping,” in which the faces of celebrities are grafted onto the bodies of porn actors. Another hacker tactic is to graft voice-overs onto images of, say, Barack Obama uttering statements that he never made in order to sway opinion. “When used maliciously as disinformation, or when used as misinformation, a piece of synthetic media is called a ‘deepfake,’ ” writes the author; when deepfakes pile up, the result is “Infocalypse.” In this brief survey, Schick examines current uses of false media, much of which comes from labs in Russia in order to seed Western sources with misinformation—the rape of a German woman by refugees, for instance, an event that never occurred. This sowing of misinformation is rendered especially easy in polarized electorates in which citizens are prepared to believe the worst of their opponents. It was rampant in 2016—and, as Schick writes, “The fact that this matter has become a partisan political issue in the United States, with one side paranoid about Russia and the other denying that Russia is a threat at all, shows that the Kremlin’s strategy is working beautifully”—and it’s likely to get far worse in 2020, with not just Russia, but also Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China attempting to influence the outcome of the presidential election. The flimflammery is not just political, writes the author, who notes that Interpol has intercepted campaigns to promote some 34,000 “fake coronavirus products.”
Those concerned with the criminal side of technology will learn from Schick’s well-mounted argument.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5430-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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